This post was originally written by Jennifer Lynch on December 20, 2010 on The E-Advisor Blog, where education meets edgy.

The pleasures of vinyl records can’t be overstated: filled with warm sound, they connect with listeners on a fundamental era and serve as reminders of a time when music was consumed more slowly but with no less passion. (Track skipping is tricky enough, but finding a specific clip in a song is basically impossible.) Records also appeal to collectors because they often have to be hunted down, and while you can buy plenty of high-quality LP reissues at your local record store, there’s something infinitely more pleasing about scouring the bargain bins for hours to come across some amazing and almost forgotten work of art. For those who love the art form, these blogs offer everything from stories by fellow collectors to tips on how to become an audiophile. Drop the needle and read on.

Helping me ring in the new year here on Tight Mix this week is a very tight band that has been on my radar for months now. Escape Directors is Steve Carter (@SteveCarterMus), Colin Reiser, Nick Wilson, and Brendon Bigley. These dudes are all from northern New Jersey (where I’m at), and I’ve actually had the pleasure of playing a charity show with them in mid-2010.

Happy New Year, readers! I’ve got a resolution for some of you to consider.

A recent blog post over at Music Think Tank got readers (including me) talking about the proposed “death” of the album format. For some reason, humans love proclaiming things to be dead, and the album format in music has been declared deceased countless times over the past decade. Here’s proof:

The album isn’t dead. Vinyl isn’t dead. CD’s aren’t dead. I own and buy albums, and this is coming from twenty-two year old, not your hippie father. I’m not trying to say all of these people are wrong. Yes, I understand that these formats aren’t mainstream anymore, nor were they ever mainstream in my lifetime. But, the market for albums still exists. Even more, you can be profitable selling albums if you know your fan base well, price the products well, and know how to market to them (…I didn’t say it was easy). Third Man Records does this brilliantly.

I’m not even going to cover the other issues in that particular article, because somebody already beat me to it, and did a good job. Also, it’s not what this blog post is about. I’d like to address something else that I see all the time on the web, and that has really been getting under my skin lately.

Although Facebook has roughly five times as many users as Twitter, both of their user bases are still enormous. Facebook is currently around 500 million users and growing, and Twitter is around the 100 million mark, and also expanding quickly. Dozens of statistics have been released in 2010 about the demographics surrounding these two growing social media giants, and the infographic below compares their respective demographical information.

It seems like only yesterday when the term “Web 2.0″ starting popping up all over the place. It was the “new direction” of websites, providing an extra level of engagement on the web in the form of social interactions. Big, household names quickly emerged and became the leaders of the strange phenomenon we now refer to as social media.

In 2010, some of the biggest “Web 2.0″ sites have seen significant declines in traffic. A quick trip over to Compete makes this painfully evident, and makes me wonder how many of these web 2.0 giants will manage in the coming years.